Scope AR, the leader in Enterprise Augmented Reality, set the stage for AR applications more than 10 years ago and is now a fully integrated solution in the aviation industry. Come join us at this year’s MRO conference, where you can see first-hand how far AR has come as a fully-integrated solution with proven ROI on the hangar floor.
In the Aviation industry, recent events have proven that it’s too easy to “miss” a few things in the MRO process if you don’t have the proper systems in place. But those systems themselves are very complex – PLM, FSM, and MES systems among countless others, that all need to work together. With AR, instructions can be given to the worker visually in real time – leading to far fewer errors (even zero), and a documentation stream most manufacturers can only dream of.
AR technology has transformed highly complex product & equipment assembly, manufacturing, maintenance & repair, field & customer support, even employee training. Innovations in hardware, data integrations, IoT, and AI have united systems across MRO management. We’re seeing real use cases, with real results.
I’m ecstatic to announce that Scope AR has raised a $9.7M Series A! This follows a strong year for Scope AR and we’re on track to have an even better 2019. We’re so excited to have the resources we need to grow and to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that lies before us, which is nothing less than transforming how people perform work in the heavy industries. We’re just at the beginning of the journey with augmented reality-enabled applications, and we have a clear and expanding vision of what is needed to become the global leader in workforce knowledge management.
When we built our first augmented
reality project back in 2012, we were blown away by the market
opportunity that presented itself, and today is another milestone in
enabling front line workers to receive the information they need to do
their jobs more effectively. It’s only a matter of time before this
technology is in the hands of every blue-collar worker, and it’s
extremely exciting to be on the front lines of this world-changing
technology, particularly with the recent advances in hardware which are
finally allowing our dream to come to fruition.
In 2018, Apple and Google both got
into the AR game with ARKit and ARCore, and Microsoft made a big push
with their Hololens headset. With the support of these hardware players
and billions of devices ready to take advantage of this amazing
technology, AR seems ready to take off, and Scope AR is poised to take
advantage of this changing landscape. The core ethos around the company
is knowledge transfer – getting knowledge into a worker’s hands as soon
as possible, enabling them to have the knowledge they need, when they
need it. We have accomplished that goal in a couple of core
capabilities:
Remote AR (Remote Assistance), the
first AR-enabled remote assistance app, which allows a front-line
technician to obtain knowledge and collaborate with someone who has that
knowledge in real time, with the enabling technology of augmented
reality providing that key communication medium that you just don’t get
with FaceTime or Skype.
WorkLink,
the first no-code authoring platform, which allows non-technical users
to create intuitive, visual work instructions for virtually any worker
to receive intuitive, visual guided instructions for the purposes of
training, maintenance, or assembly.
And we aren’t done yet! Stay tuned for some great announcements in the next few months.
Continuing to look ahead, Scope AR
will use this round of capital to grow our sales and marketing teams, as
well as our development teams. We have an extensive roadmap to build to
become the global leader in workforce knowledge management. To help
guide us in this journey, I’m extremely happy to welcome Wayne Hu of
SignalFire and Krishna K. Gupta of Romulus Capital to the board of
directors.
I’m very excited about the future and what we’ll be able to achieve with these additional resources. And if you’re looking to join a rockstar team with huge ambitions to change the world – we’re hiring!
Thriving enterprise AR company continues growth and demonstrated
success with Fortune 500 leaders including Lockheed Martin and Unilever
SAN FRANCISCO, March 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Scope AR, the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality (AR) solutions, today announced it has secured a $9.7 million round of Series A funding. The round was led by Romulus Capital, with follow-on investment participation from existing investors SignalFire, Susa Ventures, Haystack, New Stack Ventures, North American Corporation and Angel List. Krishna Gupta of Romulus Capital and Wayne Hu from SignalFire will join Scope AR’s Board of Directors.
“AR is becoming an important tool for how knowledge is shared within
heavy industry, allowing workers to get the information they need, when
they need it, in an intuitive way,” said Scott Montgomerie,
CEO and co-founder of Scope AR. “We are thrilled to have the support of
our new and existing investors to accelerate our growth and development
during a crucial inflection point in the market. It underscores, yet
again, that enterprise AR is a leading driver within mixed reality
thanks to the impressive ROI and growing list of use cases the
technology enables.”
With this latest infusion of capital, the company has a raised a total of $15.8 million, which will allow the company to further scale and expand enterprise AR adoption in a time when the industrial workforce is shifting and machinery and equipment are becoming increasingly complex. The company is among the first to deliver noteworthy ROI from real-world customer use cases across aerospace, consumer packaged goods and manufacturing industries. Using the company’s products – WorkLink and Remote AR – industry leaders such as Lockheed Martin, Unilever and Prince Castlehave achieved impactful results around improving worker efficiencies, reducing equipment downtime and more accurately diagnosing repair issues.
“Enterprises are now realizing that leveraging AR and other agile,
remote software solutions can be the answer to many operational
challenges they have always faced — from closing the growing skills gap
to reducing downtime,” said Krishna K. Gupta,
founder and general partner of Romulus Capital. “Scope AR’s product
leadership and vision has put them at the forefront of the industry,
addressing these challenges with tools that provide workers with instant
access to critical information that helps resolve operational issues in
an agile and accurate manner. We’re excited about their product roadmap
and growth opportunities as we work more closely with some of the
largest enterprises in the world.”
About Scope AR Scope AR is the pioneer of enterprise-class augmented reality solutions, delivering the industry’s only cross-platform AR tools for getting workers the knowledge they need, when they need it. The company is revolutionizing the way enterprises work and collaborate by offering AR tools that provide more effective and efficient knowledge-sharing to conduct complex remote tasks, employee training, product and equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, field and customer support, and more. The company’s device-agnostic technology supports smartphones, tablets and wearables, making it easy for leading organizations like Boeing, Toyota, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Assa Abloy, GE and others to quickly scale their use of AR to any remote worker. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco with offices in Edmonton, Canada.
The manufacturing industry has a long history of constant innovation. In this “man versus machine” industry, there has always been a precarious balance between innovation and having the right labor force to successfully drive these innovations. A new skills gap study by Deloitte predicts that 4.6 million new manufacturing jobs will be created in the U.S. between 2018 and 2028. More than half (2.4 million) of these new jobs are predicted to be unfilled.
“Why?” you may ask. As an aging workforce is soon walking out the
door, taking with them years of expert knowledge, the manufacturing
industry is now facing tremendous pressure to do more with less. Costs
of equipment, product assembly, and workforce training are continuing to
rise. At the same time, technology is driving an even greater need for a
skilled labor force as the complexity of machines and manufacturing
equipment is also increasing. These drivers are creating new challenges
for manufacturing companies to identify innovative ways to save time,
cut costs and ensure their more generalist workforce has the knowledge
they need to successfully complete their jobs.
Augmented Reality (AR) is proving to be one of the most impactful
technologies influencing the manufacturing industry, helping many
enterprises in the space overcome current obstacles. Workers can now
connect in real-time to get the expert help they need, reducing errors
and equipment downtime. Knowledge experts even have the ability to share
predefined AR-driven work instructions for common problems in the
field. AR technologies can also jump start training processes by
circumventing the need for large volumes of paperwork instructions or
user manuals. Workers can access intuitive AR content on-demand, which
is overlaid on top of a piece of equipment or machine in the real world,
dramatically reducing the time it takes to reach a certain competency
level or even learning a new procedure on the fly.
A perfect example of how AR is transforming the manufacturing world is with Lockheed Martin, an American global aerospace company, and their current project of building the Orion spaceship. Historically, aerospace companies have been dependent on paper manuals (sometimes thousands of pages in length) to access detailed manufacturing instructions. As you can imagine, building a spacecraft takes incredible precision—it’s a “measure twice, cut once” scenario magnified to the extreme. Using AR, Lockheed Martin’s Space division technicians can now see digital information and assembly instructions overlaid onto components of the spacecraft. The results have been dramatic. They have seen a 35-50 percent reduction in overall technician time, a 90-99 percent reduction in the time it takes technicians to interpret drawings and text instructions and an 85 percent reduction in overall time for training.
Unilever, a British-Dutch transnational consumer goods company, is
another great use case where AR is driving dramatic ROI. They are using
real-time remote assistance AR technologies to connect workers on the
factory line with experts located in a different part of their
campus. This enables manufacturing factory line workers to solve
problems quickly and dramatically reduce downtown of essential
equipment. They have experienced a 50 percent reduction in overall
downtime and an impressive 1,700+ percent ROI relative to their cost of
using the AR solution.
A final example is with Prince Castle, a manufacturer of steaming,
toasting and smallwares technology. Prince Castle supplies the leading,
global fast food chain with food preparation and other kitchen equipment
such as toasters. When their highly specialized equipment becomes
inoperable, Prince Castle contracts with general contractors in local
markets to come onsite and assess the problem. Using an AR-based live
video calling solution, these general contractors can quickly and
accurately diagnose the problem and get immediate remote expert advice
to fix the equipment. As a result of adopting AR solutions, Prince
Castle has experienced an amazing 100 percent success rate in diagnosing
the problem on the first visit, a reduction of 50 percent of the
service trips needed to properly repair a piece of equipment and a 50-80
percent reduction in labor spend.
With a dwindling labor force coupled with an increased need for
highly trained and specialized workers, the importance of technologies
like AR will play an increasingly critical role in the manufacturing
industry. Early adopters have already realized they must transform
business processes to improve worker efficiency, reduce equipment
downtime and maintenance costs, and more accurately diagnose and resolve
support and repair issues—and that AR can be the answer to these
challenges. More and more manufacturers will realize the benefits AR can
deliver and its impact will become even more pervasive in the years
ahead.
Scott Montgomerie is the co-founder and CEO of Scope AR.
Remember Glass? When Google introduced its augmented reality (AR) eyewear, the initial excitement faded into disdain for early adopters, who earned a memorable nickname: Glassholes. The user affectation, as well as the cost and paucity of reasons to actually use them in nature, doomed AR wearables in the consumer electronics space, at least for now. But that changes if you look to the factory or shop floor, writes Jake Swearingen in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine. “In such settings, augmented-reality smart glasses are already being deployed across a wide swath of industries.” Scott Montgomerie, CEO and co-founder of Scope AR (San Francisco, CA), was an early advocate of AR in the manufacturing space and has played a key role in its adoption at companies such as Lockheed Martin and GE. He will speak to his experience at the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Summit during the co-located PLASTEC West and Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West event in Anaheim, CA, on Feb. 5 to 7, 2019. In advance of the event, he shared some perspectives on the technology with PlasticsToday.
The eureka moment regarding AR opportunities in manufacturing came to
Montgomerie at a mining convention in Las Vegas. “We began playing
around with AR in 2012, when a big mining company came to Scope AR,
asking if our technology could be used for training. We did a proof of
concept, which went really well, and the company asked us to bring it to
a trade show in Las Vegas later that year.” The demo was an instant
hit, with a constant stream of attendees telling Montgomerie and his
colleagues that it was “the coolest thing” at the show. “And we were,
like, really? Because those giant mining trucks with wheels
bigger than your living room looked really cool to us!” recalled
Montgomerie. Nevertheless, the die was cast. Scope AR started getting
contracts from the likes of Toyota, Boeing and NASA. By 2015, “we
decided that this platform was going to scale and there needed to be an
easy way to create instructions and interact,” said Montgomerie.
Scope AR’s WorkLink allows users with no prior coding skills to
create rich AR smart instructions that automatically collect data and
provide actionable insights, which can be deployed globally through an
app. Instead of rifling through paper instructions, users are immersed
in computer-generated 3D imagery that overlays on top of the real world,
explains the company on its website. The software is platform
agnostic—”we want people to be able to use the technology they feel
comfortable with,” explained Montgomerie—and is also the first authoring
system to provide full support for Microsoft’s HoloLens system. The
company also offers Remote AR, which allows a worker to collaborate
remotely with an expert, both of whom are seeing the same thing as if
they were standing side by side. The possibilities and efficiencies that
can be achieved are head spinning.
Using a HoloLens, for example, instructions can be overlaid on a part
or piece of equipment using 3D models to perform maintenance or
assemble a part, explained Montgomerie. Human error is dramatically
reduced and efficiency skyrockets. Montgomerie cites Unilever, which
reported an astonishing return on investment of more than 1,700%, and
Lockheed Martin, which reduced manufacturing time by 50%.
“I’m particularly fond of the Lockheed Martin use case, which involves the space shuttle,” Montgomerie told PlasticsToday.
It is making a “capsule with 3000 fasteners that need to be tightened.
The old way of doing it was to paw through a 3000-page binder, look up
the table, find the fastener in question, look up the torque setting,
crawl into a tight space to get to the fastener, set the torque, do
quality assurance to verify it was tightened properly, and rinse and
repeat 3000 times,” said Montgomerie. “Our AR technology shows the
technician where the fastener is and on top of that displays the torque
setting. Productivity was improved by 50%,” said Montgomerie.
If the task is more complex and requires expert assistance, Remote AR
offers a time-saving solution. “Suppose you have a part that doesn’t
fit and you need to reach out to a manufacturing engineer or even the
OEM,” explained Montgomerie. To help out, typically the expert would
have to physically come to the shop floor. That could take days in some
cases. With our technology, they can communicate over video in real time
and real space across synchronized devices.”
Employee training is another area where AR is revolutionizing
processes in organizations as disparate as the U.S. military and
Walmart. Writing in Forbes, AR and virtual reality entrepreneur
Lorne Fade notes that Microsoft has made a $480 million deal with the
U.S. Army to train troops for complex, dangerous real-world situations
via AR and that Walmart has partnered with Oculus and Strivr to teach
personnel internal processes in an immersive AR-enabled way. For
Montgomerie, AR technology may even represent a partial solution to the
skills gap.
“It takes a lot of time to gain expertise—10,000 hours, right? What
if you could receive instructions that are so intuitive that you
wouldn’t have to memorize them?” said Montgomerie. “You can store tons
of information on the internet and then you become the actuator.”
The skills gap is heightened as baby boomers retire en masse. “All of
that knowledge is literally walking out the door,” said Montgomerie. “A
feature that we are working on is the capability of recording
interactions. As the technician is receiving instructions from an
expert, the video, audio and 3D adaptation, on a separate channel, are
being recorded. Later, you can go back and replay that interaction on
top of that piece of equipment.” When the expert retires, his knowledge
stays with the company and continues to educate young workers.
The power of AR in these scenarios and countless others resides in
the richness of the communication channel. “The user interface allows
you to communicate in a much more natural way. Now we’re interacting
with real and virtual objects in a real world setting and that neatly
solves so many problems that stem from a misinterpretation of
instructions. Montgomerie cites an example that almost everyone on the
planet can relate to: Assembling Ikea furniture.
“An expert attempts to communicate through diagrams, but the
technician, or consumer in this example, misunderstands those
instructions and uses the wrong fastener or beam. With AR, you can see
the pieces overlaid on top of the furniture in 3D, and you will
certainly make fewer mistakes. Through that form of communication, you
viscerally understand what you need to do versus trying to interpret
instructions,” said Montgomerie.
And that’s the crux of it: Whether you’re assembling a Dagstorp sofa
or tightening screws on a space shuttle component, AR reduces human
error and accelerates the process. No wonder that the AR market is
forecast to grow at 75% CAGR through 2024, exceeding $50 billion by
2024, according to Market Study Report LLC.
Montgomerie will lead a discussion devoted to modernizing
manufacturing with augmented reality at the co-located Medical Design
& Manufacturing (MD&M) West and PLASTEC West event in Anaheim,
CA. The presentation, scheduled for Feb. 7 at 10:15 AM, is part of the
Smart Manufacturing Innovation Summit. MD&M West and PLASTEC West will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center from Feb. 5 to 7, 2019.
The AR Cloud, ruggedized hardware, and a consumer-friendly app
ecosystem. Could 2019 be the year this technology breaks out of the
novelty phase?
Augmented Reality is still pretty lame. Sorry, I know that’s a broad
brush to paint an increasingly diverse technology category, but that’s
my professional opinion.
On the enterprise side, AR is finally showing some indications of becoming genuinely useful, particularly in sectors like field service, but adoption has been uneven. On the consumer side, it’s pretty much all face swaps and cheesy marketing “experiences” crafted for brands conned by marketing teams into thinking they’re in danger of missing a phantom wave of mixed reality adoption.
But if AR is still sputtering, it’s equally true the category has
tremendous potential and is bound to change the way we interact with and
interpret our world.
To get some insight on how and where AR will progress in 2019, I reached out to Scott Montgomerie, co-founder and CEO of Scope AR, a company that crafts enterprise AR solutions for various industries. Here are three areas where we can expect significant leaps forward in 2019.
HARDWARE WILL BECOME MORE RUGGEDIZED
There’s a big barrier inhibiting AR adoption right now: Many of the
sectors that could most benefit from AR require workers to go into
demanding environments that are brutal on hardware.
“While more and more companies are using AR glasses or headsets,”
says Montgomerie, “they are still fragile and expensive. As such, users
are hesitant to bring them to high risk environments, such as a
construction site or an oil rig, where they could easily get broken.”
That should change in 2019. Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 is expected to launch, likely adding durability to one of the most popular enterprise headsets. More than 75 percent of respondents in Digi-Capital’s Augmented/Virtual Reality Report pointed to Microsoft HoloLens as the smartglasses platform that matters most to their company.
Several other companies, including Apple, are working on AR devices
as well, and it’s a sure bet they’re eyeing use cases that will require a
measure of durability.
PROGRESS AROUND THE AR CLOUD WILL LEAD TO A NEW LEVEL OF COLLABORATION
Some definitions are in order. The AR Cloud is a digital copy of the real world that’s accessible to everyone, and it’s going to be really important. How important?
“The AR Cloud will be the single most important software
infrastructure in computing, far more valuable than Facebook’s social
graph or Google’s pagerank index,” says Augmented World Expo Founder and CEO Ori Inbar.
That statement makes sense if you can envision a future in which
digital information about people, objects, and places will be derived
not from Googling them using text but from training a camera at them.
When a publicly accessible digital copy of the real world is complete,
training an AR device at just about anything will yield a wealth of
information.
There’s a race underway now to control the AR Cloud. Google, which
has paved the way with its Street View efforts, is firmly in the lead,
but there’s been a groundswell of activity in the area.
“The progress being made on the AR Cloud will unlock a new set of use
cases and allow co-workers (or consumers) to communicate in an
unprecedented way that’s more precise and location-specific,”
Montgomerie told me. “Several startups who are working solely on AR
Cloud development came out of stealth mode this year.”
Because an AR Cloud will be interoperable and available to everyone,
it promotes multiplayer AR experiences. Two people working on an oil rig
can access complementary technical and sensor data in real time, for
instance, aiding enterprise collaboration. Two consumers will be able to
enjoy the same AR experience on different devices, bringing a social
aspect to a technology that’s been single player so far.
2019 IS THE YEAR IN WHICH WE’LL SEE THE LAUNCH OF THE INDUSTRY’S FIRST PRACTICAL CONSUMER APPLICATIONS
Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore debuted
in the second half of 2017. That timing is important, because it means
developers and startups have now had enough time to get their feet wet
with the technology and gauge market response to begin producing
meaningful consumer apps.
“About a year and a half after the original Apple App store launched,
developers finally learned how to leverage a touch screen to build
engaging and useful user interfaces, and app development exploded,”
explains Montgomerie. “AR app development requires a whole new way of
thinking. Much like the iPhone’s user experience required a transition
from mouse-and-keyboard interaction to touch, AR experiences require a
new method of interaction.”
Fortunately, Montgomerie believes developers are and consumers alike
are becoming fluent in these new modes of technology interaction.
“We’re starting to see the signs that mobile AR is following the same growth trajectory as mobile apps.”
If that’s true, expect the technology to finally escape the doldrums of face swaps and tacky brand promotions in the year ahead.
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